Software systems and applications are increasingly used to improve business enterprise decision-making and governance. Business Intelligence (BI) software tools provide techniques for analyzing and leveraging enterprise applications and data. These tools are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, service provision, customer and supplier analyses. More specifically, these tools can include reporting and analysis tools to analyze, forecast and present information, content delivery infrastructure systems for delivery, storage and management of reports and analytics and integration tools to analyze and generate workflows based on enterprise systems. BI tools work with data management systems, such as relational databases or On-Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) systems used to collect, store, and manage raw data and transactional enterprise systems that generate data.
Reporting tools and other business intelligence applications allow a user to explore business data by consolidating raw data from disparate sources, performing calculations on the data (e.g., aggregate, subtract, etc.) and specifying various views of the underlying data (e.g., specifying various dimensions and measures along which they would like to dissect data). In addition to having wide control over how to manipulate raw data to view the exact dimensions and measures of interest, business users want to be able to display reports whose underlying data can change based on contextual information.
BI applications are increasingly using contextual information to provide an experience adapted for each particular user. This is especially the case with large enterprises that have large number of users using particular BI applications. Contextual information, as used herein, can take many different forms. It can be geographic (e.g., user location, location of an object of interest), some information descriptive of natural conditions (e.g., temperature variation) and other information that could define the context of use of the data and/or the device being used by the end user. Changes in such contextual information can influence change various aspects of the BI application including what is being displayed and/or access given to the user. However, interjecting such contextual information into BI processes such as reports often require manual intervention by a user and/or polling of a remote data source. Such actions can negatively impact the usability of BI processes and/or the performance of BI processes.